Pinball, 1973 Review

Haruki Murakami tends to write two kinds of novel: ones with a story and ones without; Pinball, 1973 is unfortunately the latter.

A translator with twin live-in girlfriends (I know, just humour the author’s sad wish fulfilment fantasy) develops an obsession with pinball, specifically a pinball machine called Spaceship. One day his machine disappears. He half-heartedly goes looking for it…. zzz…

This is part of Murakami’s Rat series where a character called The Rat appears. It’s even more underwhelming than it sounds. The Rat is just a moody barfly who drinks beer and doesn’t do much else – I really don’t know why Murakami kept putting him in books as a recurring character given how dull he was. It’s not even clear why he’s called The Rat, unless it’s a description of his general uselessness.

The Rat chapters read like the worst kind of pretentious arthouse movie scenes – he drinks, he smokes, he says inane drivel that I guess is intended to be profound wisdom – and I have no idea what his inclusion added to the novel; far as I can tell, it’s nothing.

There are bits and pieces of the book that are intermittently interesting like the section on the country well digger, the history of the pinball manufacturer and the twins, who were just strange as they didn’t seem real. And the book overall is as clearly written as most of Murakami’s work is.

This being Murakami’s second novel, readers familiar with his later, much better books will recognise here what will become trademarks of his storytelling style: cats, wells, jazz, The Beatles (the book closes with the protagonist playing Rubber Soul, the second track of which, Norwegian Wood, would become the title of his breakthrough novel).

His female characters though remain as one-dimensional as ever. Besides a minor character at the start, none of the female characters are named – the interpreter’s colleague is simply referred to as “the girl”, as is the college girl in his flashback, while the twins are numbers, 208 and 209!

I’ve tried deciphering it but I’m completely clueless as to what this one was supposed to be about. The narrator talks about meeting people from Saturn and Venus at the start, the pinball machine is called Spaceship, so… ? Is the pinball machine meant to symbolise something, like a lost love – is that what that hallucinatory sequence at the end was about? No real point is established and the book just stops so it’s fairly unsatisfying. What I’ll charitably call “the story” as a whole was a bit too obtuse for me and could’ve been more focused.

It wasn’t a total bust but Pinball, 1973 is definitely one of Haruki Murakami’s lesser novels – fans only. For those who’d like to start reading Murakami, I recommend checking out A Wild Sheep Chase or The Strange Library instead.